Towards an uncertain future

Date: 22/11/03

Enlargement will mean a looser-knit Union

GUIDED by treaties that scarcely any- body can understand, towards a destination on which nobody can agree, the European Union has survived, and often thrived, for almost half a century. The need for a lasting peace in western Europe gave it early momentum. It offered devastated countries the vision of a supranational order intrinsically more peaceful than the nationalism which had fed Hitler's war. The attractions of this order diminished for nation-states as the memories of war receded. But the collapse of the Soviet empire, and the opportunity to restore and rebuild the eastern half of Europe, gave the EU a new leading role. It offered a vision of freedom and prosperity for which countries hungered after decades under communist rule. This enlargement is the happy outcome of that offer.

History will judge the EU kindly for having done at least two great jobs well. But ask what great job it will do next, and the answer is far from clear. Some further enlargement may take place in 2007 and beyond, but the only truly sinew-stiffening challenge on the agenda there is the admission of Turkey, which remains at best a very distant possibility. Countries led by Germany and France want the EU's next great leaps to take it forward into a common foreign policy and a common defence capability. But these are projects which, if ever seriously pursued, will divide the EU more than unite it. Some older members, notably Britain, hesitate for political or ideological reasons. They dislike the implied threat to national sovereignty, and they fear adventures that might make Europe more a rival to America.

Some new members share these reservations, mixed with more pragmatic ones. It will take them another three years at least to become full members of the Schengen regime; perhaps five or seven years to join the common currency; and ten years or more to master and implement every last rule of the EU as it is today. They do not want the Union to be changing its rules and adding new ones from the moment they join. The new members will be a powerful lobby within the EU for as little change as possible, at least where change means new costs and burdens.

This counts as an unwelcome and even a dangerous situation for those who believe that the Union thrives on a diet of constant change. Big new projects draw governments together in constructive ways. They encourage experimental give-and-take. Inertia, by contrast, leaves governments to come together more in arguments about current policies, be they state aids, excessive deficit procedures, competition law or farm subsidies. Disputes run together easily and erode the general willingness of countries to co-operate at all.

There is real danger here, because the EU is still a fragile thing. It has never won the hearts and minds of all its citizens, the vast majority of whom identify obstinately with their nation-states. Nor does it have much coherence as a political project, now that it has abandoned supranationalism as its final goal without substituting anything else.

The term “political union” survives in EU rhetoric, but without a meaning. Governments are inadvertently demonstrating this point (or lack of it) with their losing battle to capture the Union's aim and scope in a constitutional treaty. They seek to increase the stability and legitimacy of the EU, but risk having the opposite effect. The EU will suffer a big psychological reversal if governments fail to agree on a text, and perhaps a crisis if some countries accept the document while others do not.

Where the EU has succeeded, brilliantly, is as a bureaucratic project. It is shaped, not mainly by its citizens' wishes nor by its founders' intentions, but by the deals done each day between ministers and civil servants in Brussels, usually behind closed doors, endorsed by a parliament to which few outsiders pay heed.

That is not necessarily a bad scheme. The participating countries are well-functioning democracies. Ministers act only within what they judge to be the tolerance of their voters. But enlargement from 15 to 25 countries next year will make the bureaucratic project much harder to manage. A 10% rise in traffic can bring gridlock to the centre of a busy city. A two-thirds rise in membership may bring gridlock to a busy EU. Misunderstandings and disagreements will multiply, even with goodwill on all sides. Two or three actively awkward countries will be enough to guarantee chaos. Other empires have over-extended themselves to the point of collapse, and the EU is at least courting this fate.

The case for optimism rests on the proposition that the EU's workings can adjust quickly and smoothly to a big increase in its size and composition. But a bigger EU will be a more fragmented EU. The countries in it will be far more diverse, whether measured by wealth, history, politics, geography or language. Their interests will be equally diverse. Sub-groups and alliances will form in pursuit of particular policies or priorities. This will be a healthy trend, a source of pluralism and innovation within the Union, so long as the blocks do not become too rigid or too exclusive. If they do become so, the risk will grow of a de facto split within the Union, putting in danger the good functioning of all Union-wide policies and institutions.

A more diverse and fragmented Union will be one that countries leave as well as join. None has left until now (though Greenland, a province of Denmark, did so in 1985), partly because members have bent over backwards to accommodate one another's vital interests. But the more the EU enlarges, the less drama there will be in the loss of a single member, and the less possibility there will be for making all the compromises needed to keep everybody happy. The draft constitutional treaty provides for the possibility of a country's secession, but has nothing useful to say about the transitional arrangements that might be needed.

To say that this enlargement will mean the most uncertain period for the EU since its founding, is not to say that this enlargement was a bad idea. On the contrary, it was the noblest use to which the EU of the 1990s could be put.

The accession countries will take time to find their feet, but they are joining after years of effort and they have motives at least as strong as any older member to make the EU go on working. By that, they mean an EU that goes on working in concrete ways, on things which benefit all its members proportionately: arrangements such as the single market, the Schengen system, perhaps the single currency once its teething troubles are past. They will have less enthusiasm for an EU that expects its smaller and poorer members to subordinate themselves to the ambitions of its bigger and richer ones, and which uses pieties about a political union to cloak that process.

Enlargement will mean a looser-knit Union. Article is part of a survey 'When east meets west: a survey of EU enlargement'.

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